Many of today's communication service providers offer telephone services to subscribers with a feature commonly known as “simultaneous ringing”. Using this feature, a subscriber may associate one or more secondary telephone numbers with a primary telephone number. Thereafter, an incoming telephone call directed to the primary telephone number will cause the telephones, personal communication devices, and/or other devices associated with the primary and secondary telephone numbers to ring, supposedly, in a simultaneous manner. By supposedly causing the telephones, personal communication devices, and/or other devices to ring simultaneously, the possibility of the subscriber missing the incoming telephone call is reduced as long as the subscriber is near one of the telephones, personal communication devices, and/or other devices associated with the primary and secondary telephone numbers. Also, because the telephones, personal communication devices, and/or other devices associated with the secondary telephone numbers are caused to ring, the caller placing the incoming telephone call need not place more than one telephone call to different telephone numbers in attempting to reach the subscriber.
Often, however, the telephones, personal communication devices, and/or other devices associated with the primary and secondary telephone numbers do not actually ring simultaneously. Typically, such non-simultaneous ringing occurs due to the telephones, personal communication devices, and/or other devices associated with the primary and secondary telephone numbers being accessible through different communication networks having different response times. For example, if a primary telephone number corresponds to a first telephone accessible through a first communication network having a first response time, a first secondary telephone number corresponds to a second telephone accessible through a second communication network having a second response time, and a second secondary telephone number corresponds to a personal communication device accessible through a third communication network having a third response time, the first and second telephones and the personal communication device may not ring simultaneously due to the first, second and third response times of the first, second and third communication networks being, respectively, different. Moreover, the first telephone may ring before the second telephone and the second telephone may ring before the personal communication device rings.
Therefore, there is a need in the industry for apparatuses and methods for implementing a simultaneous ringing feature that causes telephones, personal communication devices, and/or other devices associated with primary and secondary telephone numbers to actually ring simultaneously or in a near simultaneous manner, and that may address other problems, difficulties, and/or shortcomings of current technology that may or may not be described herein.